Friday, September 4, 2009

PDX ARt: "Collage" or why panic won't lead you anywhere

Where the trees lay down to pray the past lays down as well but the past is a lie and Art is not. Collage is the re-imagination of a parallel universe made from ready made junk bonbons for immediate consumption but with an aftertaste of awakening.Collage is never what it seems to be. It's like happiness without a price tag like the Sea that has no destination but changes currents at the whim of the sun.

Collage used as a means of artistic expression is art cut loose from predictability to be pasted onto instability.Collage is not like a dog that runs after a stick but is the dog that chews up everything that is available just for the pleasure of it.

It is a technique consisting of natural or manufactured materials stuck to a painted or unpainted back round.Collage is probably older than Moses but gained notoriety because Picasso more or less lifted collage up into the realm of Art by pasting a section of pre-existing printed cloth to one of his cubist creations.

Other artists experimented with it like Gris or Malevich and a host of futurists and Dadaists like Schwitters took it to a hole other level re-assigning meaning according to intellectual concepts or to explain the human condition and its social- political environment in new ways.Dada & Surrealist Art Collage is part of a group of artistic practices including Assemblage which paved a fresh path as an escape route from the limitation of the traditional surface of the painted canvas, panel or wall.I can hear Kippenberger say in my mind " I am a Collage of everything that ever happened to me"I even would say I am a collage of everything before before me.

I've always been attracted to collage and I like to re-purpose existing materials first to stop the cycle of waste and secondly to document the time frame in which these materials are produced.To me cut outs are like a Political street signs which shows me where society is coming from and where we are going trend wise. I feel empowered by taking for example advertising snippets and change there original meaning to sell us a product and re-conceptualize that attempt and assign them a whole new meaning.

My hope is that this process will have a mirror effect on us as a demographic of consumers and give us a glimpse of how our thinking is constantly shaped and manipulated by media out-lets.Panic attacks are usually caused to stir up emotions and force us to run to the next best store and buy back some tranquility.

New medias popping onto cyber screens and re-imagining Collage by sampling images and sounds to forge a contemporary version for future generations to admire.

In hind sight Collage is like a puzzle that stretches our imagination to its furthest corners and allows us to become part of the creation process as we add our own message to what we are seeing and every new generation will see them from their own unique perspective.

Without perspective as our anchor we are just a cut loose piece of wasted paper waiting to be pasted onto the canvas of someone elses Life.